OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
Softly comes Old Age, the thief,
Steals the rapture, leaves the throes.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Scherzo"
Old age makes you a stranger in your own country.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time ... but it's not like that. It happens overnight.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
If youth and manhood have been passed right, old age will be the happiest time of our worldly existence; and happy the man that can look back on the track he trod and feel no passing pain, no pang of bitter remorse. There's honor in the hoary head of three-score-years-and-ten, and a crown of glory sitting on the silvery locks of the Christian pilgrim nigh his journey's end. Without one dread, without a fear, he views the grave as, in former years, he viewed his couch, knowing that on the morning of eternity, he viewed his couch, knowing that on the morning of eternity he will rise from it, born afresh to live for ever, a life where there are no clouds or sorrow, no desponding hours, no moments of trial nor heartrending woe; but an everlasting succession of days of brightness and perfected happiness in the Paradise of the blest. The happiest days on earth are the last days of the aged Christian; then let us strive to make our last end like his, to die the death of the righteous, for in their death we behold the truth of Christianity, and the unequalled earthly glory of a ripe old age.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Old Age", Short Essays
As we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping out minds active and open.
CLINT EASTWOOD
attributed, Sad Sayings
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep ... that have taken hold.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
WASHINGTON IRVING
Bracebridge Hall
Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf,
Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child,
As a dream set afloat in the daylight.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Sixty feels exactly like 50, with aching feet and more forgetfulness.... But your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.
ANNE LAMOTT
Salon, November 3, 2014
Few know how to be old.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
When you're five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how hold you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.
SARA GRUEN
Water for Elephants
Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
JACK LONDON
"The Wit of Porportuk"